Course selection woes

It's that glorious time of year again — most students are getting excited about their classes for the upcoming semester without fully realizing how much work is coming their way. Unfortunately, I have yet to reach this scholastic wonderland. Instead, like most freshmen and a good number of sophomores, I could use a little help just knowing which courses to choose.

I suppose the first step to recovery is admitting that I have a problem. So here it goes: My name is Adam, and I have no idea what I want to major in or what I want to do when I graduate. Considering that I have not even completed my first semester, this does not strike me as being a big problem.

What does concern me, however, is that in just 18 months, I will need to make some "major choices." In order to prepare myself for this inevitability, I am on the quest for the perfect schedule. I need a good mix — I want to take classes in the areas in which I think I am interested, as well as some that will push me to expand my horizons.

My institutional guidance manifests itself in the form of a very friendly, grey-haired professor. Though I like her and believe that she genuinely cares about my future, there is now way that she, or any other advisor, can offer me well-considered advice under the constraints of the current system.

For starters, there are about 12 undergraduates per faculty advisor. No one can expect a professor to spend the time required to develop meaningful relationships with each member of this group, understand which out of the hundreds of courses offered will fit each student's needs and still have time left over for themselves.

The problem with the advising system, however, is much more serious; students are matched with their advisors by a system that is, for the most part, quite random. The administration will no doubt claim that incoming freshmen are grouped according to the responses they offered on the matriculation forms before arriving on campus. Such a method, however, is nonsensical. Students change a great deal over the summer before freshman year, when they fill out these questionnaires, and their thoughts in June are outdated come September. If Princeton does its job well, students' intellectual interests will have changed drastically when it is time to pick courses for the second semester. As a result, many underclassmen share few academic interests with their advisors and therefore do not trust them to provide relevant advice.

Since the administration is unhelpful, I turn to the USG-published Student Course Guide for help, which is perhaps the most deceptively useless publication on campus. The courses that I am interested in never seem to be reviewed. And as for the courses that are reviewed, the comments provided are either effusive in their praise or spiteful in their criticism. Like most students, I don't trust the Student Course Guide to reflect the general opinion of the student body.

In a last effort to build the perfect schedule, I look to my peers for help. Surprisingly, friends and upperclassmen have been able to point out to me a number of classes that are interesting. It concerns me that I am choosing my courses based solely on the advice of my immediate circle of peers. Choosing courses in this manner breeds a herd mentality. My peers will not force me to choose classes outside my comfort zone — they will advise me to pick courses that they and their friends have liked. They will push me toward the popular, rather than the unique and interesting.

When I voice my concern that I am making unwise choices about how to spend my limited time at Princeton, I usually receive disdainful looks. People frequently point out that I am still only a freshman and need not worry about my concentration. They, however, are wrong for ignoring me. At some point I will need to choose a major — but by then it will be too late. I can only make a wise decision then by preparing now.

My problems are not unique and are the reason that so many students congregate in the big departments, rather than concentrating in smaller ones. Though many underclassmen want to venture outside of their boxes, no one is helping them or pushing them to explore the intellectual possibilities at Princeton. If the system cannot help these students, then something is terribly wrong. Adam Bradlow is a freshman in Wilson College from Potomac, Md. He can be reached at abradlow@princeton.edu.